Dutch undone by daredevils

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MARCELO BIELSA, THE Argentina manager, likes to say that “football is a sequence of unrelated episodes”. Then again, in the 1985 film Back to the Future, Michael J. Fox goes back in time, gets hit by a car, and changes the course of history. Most football-lovers fall into the second camp. They have a natural tendency to analyse, to find turning points, to unearth the moment in time that would have massive repercussions on the outcome of a game. And few nations love their football more than the Dutch, who often raise this retrospective sleuthing for answers into an art